The Museum as a Cowboy Place: Rethinking the role of young people and youth programs

There is a set of oracle cards that I keep on my desk, created by a group of teenagers through the Rhode Island School of Design Museum. Over the last few years, as I’ve picked my way through the rubble of “the way we did things” pre-pandemic, I’ve found pulling cards from the deck to be a useful sort of compass. Amid the rubble, I’m imagining a new alternative for myself: an intermediary arts practice, working between museums, galleries and communities of young people.

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Entangled Belonging: Asian Australian artists and cultural hybridity

Cristea Nian Zhao

compost: compose

Organic matter turns into compost when it breaks down.
After brewing my cup of tea, I place wet tea leaves into my kitchen’s compost bin along with other food scraps, which I later add to my garden’s compost.
Compost over compost.
Time over time.
I write these words at exactly one year of ongoing brutality and genocide in Gaza, during the 76th year of Zionist occupation of Palestine.
I can’t help but think of what else belongs in a compost bin.
Zionism.
Militarism.
Capitalism.
Colonialism.
Extractivism.
Expansionism.
What other words that end with ‘ism’?
Which outdated world views, ideologies, systems and structures belong in a compost bin? What skeletons and bones need to break down to birth something new?

Rasha Tayeh